1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to the art of vending machines and, more particularly, to a pricing control system for vending machines, each of which is adapted to provide multiple customer operations at varying prices.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
In the art of vending machines, such as washers and dryers commonly found in a laundromat facility, operation prices have been generally set in increments of a single monetary coin, such as a quarter. Therefore, if the operator of such a facility desired to make a price increase, a minimum increase of a quarter would be necessary. Of course, this would generally represent a rather hefty increase, at least percentage wise, which may not be readily accepted by facility patrons. For this reason, the implementation of even justified price increases are typically delayed or avoided.
The introduction of debit cards for use in such facilities has greatly enhanced the ability to implement a wider range of pricing schemes. This, taken in conjunction with the fact that the machines of such facilities are now typically linked to a central processor which is used to establish the various operation prices and to monitor/collect operational data, the operators of such facilities now have the capability of establishing smaller price changes for the various machine operations.
Unfortunately, such systems still have associated limitations. For instance, the available price increments are generally a factor of a nickel or more. Although this incremental figure can be considered much more desirable than a quarter, the ability to provide even penny increments would be appealing. Of course, implementing changes to a vending system must be justified economically. Penny increments have not been attractive to establish due, at least in part, to the storage space necessary for such an arrangement. With pricing systems, it is known to utilize a ROM or RAM to store pricing data which can be accessed based on a set pricing scheme. Therefore, individual vending machine operation prices would be placed in certain storage fields. Obviously, the addition of dimes and/or nickels to a typical quarter-based pricing system would increase the amount of memory needed to provide a wide range of available operational prices. The use of penny increments would substantially increase the necessary storage space in the memory.
Although it would be possible to just provide an extremely large database of available pricing schemes, it would be much more desirable, particularly from a cost standpoint, to have the ability to vary the pricing beyond current limits without having to substantially increase the amount of available memory of a pricing module. Of course, a few factors present formidable obstacles to implementing such a system. For instance, in the case of a laundromat facility, washing machines can be generally operated in various modes and at each of hot, warm and cold temperature settings. Various operating modes would also be available for dryers of the facility. Therefore, any such pricing system would have to accommodate pricing changes for many modes of operation. In addition, due to the data stream that exists between the vending machines and the central processor in such facilities, only a couple of bytes of memory are generally available for any such pricing system change without substantially altering the basic system memory or reducing the ability of the system to monitor/collect operational data.
Based on the above, there exists a need to implement a pricing control system for multi-operation vending machines which provides for pricing changes in penny increments, can account for pricing changes in each of the multi-operation modes of the machines and requires an absolute minimum amount of storage area for the pricing data.